Jun 05 2008
Human Computer Interaction - Episode II
I managed to finish another article about Human Computer Interaction. In the previous episode we covered some rules about search results. Maybe some of you found them useful and I decided to write about Graphical User Interface (GUI).
The most used paradigm in Graphical User Interfaces is “window, icon, menu, pointing device” (WIMP). First approaches on web documents were mostly linear documents with some embedded graphics. In 21 century we have modal windows, tabbed browsing, interactive interfaces and many others that make our life easier. Interactive interfaces, build with Flash or Ajax, offers today and incredible perspectives and we almost forgot the old linear style of web documents. When I build web interfaces I try to follow some rules:
1. One click to get the information
Customers are always in a hurry. Don’t spend their valuable time on trying to understand how information is organized. Give them tips and give them the information they want on the first click. For example, if you have a music shop, make sure you have a list of genres and an alphabetic list of singers. One way or another they are closer to buy. Through one click, the results of their search it’s less generic.
Of course, keep those lists visible in all site. Even we can’t call them menus, the customer will have the feeling of navigating menus. Personally I like color contrast in menus and I prefer to place them in the top or in the right of the page even many sites place menus in the left. A very nice idea is to have a floating window that scrolls with the pages and offer quick links. That will make many clients happy because they can easily jump from one page to another.
2. Simple and suggestive icons
Users react on visual elements. Having suggestive small graphics (cart for shopping cart, money for checkout, books for a list of books etc.) will help them identify what they are looking for. Of course, you don’t have to insert such graphics everywhere, but important stuff should be marked with them.
3. Organize information with tabs
Having a substantial quantity of information on your site and articles are related, you may organize them in tabs. This approach is very useful mostly on administration interfaces or account management in social network sites. I found the development process complicate and many interface designers avoid this approach because it’s somehow hard to use.
Ajax made our life easier with this tabbed navigation but even that, I don’t recommend it in websites front-end. Keep it mostly for administrative areas.
Enough with WIMP. But we don’t have many other choices. I found over the time some different approaches like artificial intelligence with speech recognition, on mouse-over navigation but all those experiments are very confusing and with no commercial interest. So, from my personal point of view, we should keep the web simple and close to it’s primary destination: serving information in a friendly manner.
We are used with mouse, text and images and everyone knows very well how to manipulate them. Introducing new interface paradigms may confuse the visitors.
Thank you for your time and I’ll try to deliver episode III about usability.
